Abstract:

With the recent focus on teaching quality in higher education, there is now a greater focus on monitoring teaching quality. In the United Kingdom the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) was established to monitor and measure university teaching quality. This partly reflects the position of the contemporary student as a fee-paying ‘customer’ seeking value for money. The emphasis is on student satisfaction and evaluation as to whether the educational experience provided value for money. With the rapidly changing experience of the learner, the ways in which learning is being delivered is also changing and therefore the HE Sector is having to adapt and respond accordingly to existing and emergent challenges. This has been highlighted recently with the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 in which campuses were closed and the teaching shifted wholesale to an on-line delivery mode. This work examines how this change has been received by educators within the Engineering disciplines and ascertains their views on the potential benefits and drawbacks of this paradigm shift in teaching delivery. Qualitative and quantitative analysis is carried out on the outcomes from the on-line questionnaires to see how on-line delivery is seen by educators as an effective delivery mode and something that is sustainable for the long-term future delivery of engineering provisions.

Keywords:

Teaching Excellence, Online Teaching, Engineering, Student Engagement.